Apocalypse now? Potential exists

At the risk of sounding hysterical, I want to share a worry I've been harboring for the past couple of years: The world may be coming to an end. I don't mean the touchy-feely 'end of history' that Francis Fukuyama described in 1989, the global ideological consensus in which every nation decides that free markets and liberal democracies are the right way to go. I mean the apocalyptic, end-of-everything future that Charlton Heston found himself trapped in during the last reel of "Planet of the Apes," or that Kevin Costner seems to revisit in every other movie he makes.

Thinking about apocalypse has gone out of style, even given the cataclysm of Sept. 11. During the Cold War, people around the world regularly confronted the possibility of atomic holocaust. James Conant, the President of Harvard and a leading administrator of the Manhattan Project, actually started a crash-program in Cambridge in the early 1950s to microfilm the great works of human civilization so that some record of humanity's achievements would survive the nuclear winter. These days, however, it seems that no-one's much interested in this anxiety. The "war on terror" started with the aim of averting a future 9/11, but now seems to have morphed into a crusade to democratize the Middle East and enshrine "good" over "evil" from Colombia to the Philippines. In the rhetoric of the Bush administration, the End Times seem more likely to feature lions lying down with lambs than a global conflagration.

In fact, I think we're in greater danger of a really serious meltdown than at any time in human history. There are two reasons for this. First, the technology of mass destruction has become increasingly accessible around the world. While the first decades of the Cold War saw a concerted international effort to contain the spread of atomic weapons, the years since the 1970s have been a disaster for nonproliferation. Israel led the way, secretly acquiring a nuclear capability and spurring its rivals in the Middle East to pursue their own nuclear ambitions. More recently, India and Pakistan have gone nuclear, and other nations are moving in this direction. The United States has done a poor job of containing this proliferation, partly because no one in America (or Europe) wants to have a serious debate about disarmament. As long as it's OK for, say, Britain and France to retain a nuclear arsenal, North Korea is entitled to wonder why it can't also be a member of the nuclear club; ditto Israel and its neighbors. Thus we're rapidly entering a world in which nuclear technology is more readily available than it's ever been, raising the prospect either of a 'limited' nuclear war between regional powers or (even worse) the acquisition of these weapons by non-state groups like al Qaeda which have no qualms about using them to kill huge numbers of people.

The other cause for apocalyptic concern is political: The United States comprises less than 5 percent of the world's population but continues to consume more than 25percent of its resources, even as many of these resources (like oil and water) become increasingly scarce. This inequitable division is made possible by America's incredible military, economic and political prominence, and there is little sign (from either the Bush administration or from Bill Clinton's tenure in the White House) that the U.S. government is prepared to share the fruits of the planet more equitably. At the same time, Washington lacks both the geopolitical rivals that could keep it in check and the respect for international institutions and agreements (like the United Nations, the Kyoto Protocol, or the International Criminal Court) that would allow other nations to engage America politically. When these levels of disparity are systematic, and the political avenues for their redress (or even debate) have been closed, extremists will inevitably pursue their grievances through nonpolitical means.

Of course, the current Iraq crisis is reason to be very worried about the direction that the world is moving in, but an even greater cause for concern is the trajectory of America in the aftermath of the Cold War. Unwilling to share the nation's incredible prominence and wealth, successive presidential administrations, Democratic and Republican, seem oblivious to the fact that the extraordinary strengths of the United States are also the sources of its weakness. As hundreds of millions of people around the world witness the arbitrary and inequitable projection of American power, we shouldn't be surprised if a tiny minority of them — perhaps just a handful — choose to respond with apocalyptic actions. The defense against this scenario isn't unilateralism or 'preemption,' Guantanamo Bay or a 'Star Wars' missile system; it's a candid admission that if America continues to dominate the resources and peoples of the world, some day soon there may be no world left to dominate.

Nicholas Guyatt is a graduate student in the history department. He is from Bristol, England.